You are walking humming a tune: why do we do this – what’s happening? Music, especially that which is performed, entrains the body, mind and emotions into a coherent, harmonic rhythm which for a moment eliminates conflict between them, liberating conscious energy, and this is experienced as increased presence and enjoyment of life. This harmony is far more efficient in terms of conscious energy, and the liberation of this free consciousness is the aim of all artistic pursuit, all pleasure seeking, and all reconciliations of tensions and opposites in ones life. This free consciousness can be used for pure spontaneous creation, and a deepening of enjoyment, and transcendently deeper experiences, for example spiritual, thus revelations in terms of truth and understanding. But the implications are much broader. In all of our life, harmony equals transcendence! Implication being? Turn your life into a song – but make sure its your song.
What is true of all art, music and culture – that by harmonizing emotions, mind, form and force etc there is a liberation of conscious energy or life-force – is true also of any experience of pleasure, which the body and mind tend to enjoy, and also, the actual reconciliation of any tensions, conflicts or the strain of opposites in ones life. Pleasure entrains you into a harmony around a moment, but its absence divides self (the self that wants) from self (the self that has, which is now merely imaginary), and life literally falls between the two: life is cut in half, and swings between the halves – pleasure/suffering, having/not having, being/not being (e.g. thinking about, dying for, trying to get etc). Same too with all binaries: if you are always grabbing at pleasure and avoiding pain, binging greedily and purging guiltily, egoistically fearful and clinging to love, seeking abundance and fearing lack etc etc, your whole life has fallen between these mental opposites. My advice is embrace the lower term that you would usually seek to avoid – overcome all your fears and aversions by embracing them – and watch how your life transcends these binaries and ushers you into the rich plenitude of being in the now.
Other things…
It is debatable whether an egoist can truly love anything, as they are not in full possession of themselves, let alone their reality, but even if they do love fully, they love only what serves them. They love their interests, as we all do, and are interested in their loves: for what happens if you love something? You are interested in it. What happens if you love everyone? You are interested in everyone. What happens if you love everything? You are interested in everything. What happens if you love everyone and everything, and find everyone and everything interesting? You’ve got a brain haven’t you? What do you think happens? You’re overwhelmed by love – you’re intensely happy.
That which you seek to control or avoid enslaves you: the reality you avoid or judge stupefies you. It is absolute openness that sets you free by giving you the truth about yourself, your life and the world.
True happiness is love: the other kind of happiness, attained when the ego finally gets what it wants, is the emptiness of no longer needing, and alternates between itself and a sense of utter meaninglessness – an undercurrent of existential emptiness, eradicable only through forms of losing ones self. The latter is what drives the rich despite their wealth, and in spite of themselves and those whom they ‘love‘.
Ordinary thought is like a one fingered piano player. One cannot find beauty in such thought – only in what the thought is pointing towards, or suggesting, beyond itself. Intuition, however, is like a harmony of fluid moments - liquid light and sound-structures, potentially as complex as the whole of existence itself. Such thought cannot be created by a human – it is always emerging out of darkness, from beyond, made available to us when we stop allowing or promulgating petty, anxious and self-oriented thoughts.
Every time you judge, you blind yourself: and every time you judge yourself, you damage to yourself. If you recognize that things are not right or wrong but actual, you get to understand this actuality: otherwise it alludes you. ‘She shouldn’t have’, ‘he shouldn’t have’, ’I shouldn’t have’ – but they did. Don’t judge because you overlook this reality: i.e. you overlook reality. This is why judgemental people are, by definition, insensitive and stupid.
I’m no Christian, and don’t tend to quote the bible, but here’s one of many of its truths: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). If you can’t see how your fear relates to punishment, see how the self-limiting belief that’s producing it is punishing you.
In a greedy person, love is frightened and unfulfilled. They can be cured by compassion, which is to say love - they can only be cured by love: anything else will inflame their self-hate and therefore their angry, desperate, and lonely greed. As such, we must swallow our aggression during this period of transition, as the world is swinging from fear to love, and anyone who holds onto their fear will not survive it – this is how I feel things are going anyway.
If you look at a leafy plant, and notice how, say, the branch is like a modified stem, and the leaf is like a modified branch, and the flower like a modified miniature of the whole plant (for example), I find it a perfect analogy for the humans growing out of society growing out of nature. There is some variation, giving the impression of stratification, but if you really look there’s enough similarity to show that one is not different to the next. You can almost see in society vast arms and legs and thoughts – vast bodies, arteries, arms and legs and thoughts – buildings, cars, roads, bridges, tannoys, emails etc. You can see it in nature – land, rivers, streams, tributaries, clouds (thoughts) in the sky (mind) etc etc. Everything springs out of the self, society, nature, cosmos in this way – they are false as absolute distinctions, and it really shows when you awaken. The plant illustration helps us see this – it helps us see outside of the illusion of separation, and see into what quantum physicists and mystics alike have long see, and what many millions of us are beginning to see today: that we live in one total, indissoluble evolutionary structure – the entire cosmos is one.
Love is intelligence – aversion is fear, which is to say, the negation of intelligence. When you love only your interests, you are narrow – you are an egoist. When you love everyone and everything, you have an endless, borderless happiness: everything in the world energizes you – everything in the world nourishes you. This is one of many reasons why even an egoist, according to their own reason, ought to drop their egoism for good.
If you want to see the divine in every human being, you can do so as long as you don’t take their ego or their ‘story’ too seriously: that you don’t take their appearance to seriously: that you look at them with eyes that seek to understand: and that you hold no fear within you. When you do this, you realize that even the most destructive or violent tendencies are those that express life – they are life rather than death: they are life trapped in form, striving to break out of form, which is to say, mortal confinement. It’s a doorway into seeing the divine in everyone: you see within them the forces of nature, history, life etc in a complex entanglement, and within all that there is always that sparkle of life trying to free itself. When you see this you are able to love everyone, and those that previously called forth anger or resentment within you (emotions which ruin your quality of life and health), now call forth compassion.
The ego consciously avoids death and does everything in its power to avoid it. The ego unconsciously delights in its own death, as is evident by its partiality toward self-intoxication and obliteration. Indeed if there were no ego there would be no death. Death is a reality only for the ego.
The ego, which is to say the part of ourselves which thinks we are just this material body-brain complex, is that which fears, hates, suffers. Remove the ego and you remove all fear, hate and suffering from your life. Remove ego from the world, you remove all this from the world. You also remove all the seeds, and defuse the engines, of late capitalism, which is why the latter is dying today – because the former is dying: because they are a continuous, indissoluble psychosocial structure.
Our delight over the aesthetic as opposed to the conceptual or formal, for example our appreciation of the human voice in singing over the meaning of the word-forms, gives us an entry point into the world of endless difference or otherness, the world of quality, of infinite self-varying otherness. We hardly notice this living, rich, moving world because of our lack of consciousness, but this is changing – we are, so long as we’re not clinging and striving, but rather, expanding. Once we escape the deluding and stupefying gravity effect of fear, which makes us cling and strive, we can experience the whole world, even the world of concepts and forms, from this finer, more subtle level of infinite otherness – endless particularity, endless sensuous difference, where all boundaries become fluid, and all spaces join into the one great vastness. The world becomes eternally new and absorbing – we are entrained into the Now, which becomes our own self, as the borders between subject and object come crashing down. In this vastness there is no time, only space – only Now.
